Category Archives: missions

To hear Miscavige tell it, Scientology is expanding like never before. “10X expansion in the last decade than in the 50 previous years” etc etc.

Of course, there are no new orgs in decades, but that gets fudged over with the A=A=A of new building=new orgs. And never mind the fact they are empty.

Then he stands tall 0n his applebox and announces the wonders of massive expansion at the “bottom of the Bridge” in the Mission Network. You even see it in ads on TV – “10,000 churches, missions and associated groups”. Of course, if you go to Scientology.org and try to locate these entities, its impossible. There is NO listing of anything. Even the “Org and Mission” locator will not allow you to get a listing for the United States or any country for that matter. So, no numbers can be gotten. You just have to take his word for it….

But, every now and then specific examples pop up that disprove the lies.

Which brings us to this. And its a doozy.

Now, with all this enormous expansion happening, one would expect the Mission Network to be an unstoppable juggernaut of unbridled expansion (shermanspeak ®) and especially one would expect this of a Mission in a relatively large city in the United States that has no org in it or even within 200 miles.

And especially one would expect this if the Mission was one of the original “ideal missions”, in a large, prominent building in the city. Not hidden away in a strip mall out on the outskirts of town….

And extra especially if the Mission was sponsored by two famous celebrities – hometown heros in fact.

And even more so if the Mission was staffed by the best “mission staff” money could buy.

And then, to put the cherry on the cake, the Grand Opening ribbon was cut by two very prominent celebrities and the biggest celebrity of all – Mr. David Miscavige himself. Accompanied by massive free publicity.

In the words of the immortal Dan Sherman, a veritable perfect storm of perfectness where the forces of nature combined in harmonious wonder in deference to the amazingness of Dear Leader hisself: Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, the Church of Scientology of Memphis Tennessee.

Opened to enormous fanfare on Central Ave in 1997 by Lisa Marie Presley and Isaac Hayes, this should be THE model of Mission prosperity. But somehow, the Mission seems to be out of step with the rest of the world’s runaway expansion, in spite of all the advantages it had.

But there is more to the corrupt world of Miscavige than merely falsifying stats to make himself look good in the face of his shriveling empire. This is the world of financial irregularities and “buying favor.”

Enter Miscavige cronies and erstwhile spies, Benetta and David Slaughter.

For any who don’t know them, they were the employers of Lisa McPherson. Big contributors to the IAS and other projects, Benetta was at least at one time, a Miscavige “pet.”

Benetta left Clearwater to become Miscavige’s hand-picked ED of the Applied Scholastics Spanish Lake headquarters outside St. Louis. As that project wallowed and eventually failed, Benetta and David moved on to greener pastures.

And that would be Memphis, TN.

The Mission was failing, reportedly defaulting on their mortgage. In what could well have been an amends project for failing at Spanish Lake, now the Slaughters ride into town to take over the Mission.

But they apparently didn’t do anything to increase the activities and viability of the Mission. Things didn’t go well. But to avert a “flap” of a foreclosure of “Isaac and Lisa Marie’s Mission” , on 21 May 2008 David, as the “Mission Holder” sold the Mission to himself for $635,000. But this wasn’t a move designed to increase the delivery of the Mission. In fact, the Slaughters proceeded to convert it back into a home — for themselves! And earlier this year, they put it on the market for $995,000.

Here is an article from the Memphis Daily News, Friday, May 23, 2008:

Church of Scientology Sold, Will Be Converted to Home

By Eric Smith

The Midtown property housing the Church of Scientology Mission of Memphis at 1440 Central Ave. has sold for $635,487 to David Slaughter, the church’s trustee or “mission holder,” and Bennetta Slaughter, according to The Daily News Online,www.memphisdailynews.com.

The sale closed Tuesday, and Slaughter said he will renovate the 10,500-square-foot building into a residence. He said he will live in the home temporarily and eventually put it on the market once the renovations are complete.

Meanwhile, the church will stay in Memphis, but it has found another location and will move soon, Slaughter said. He wouldn’t comment on the new site, but he did confirm that the church is moving “east,” as detailed in a Feb. 3, 2006, story in The Daily News.

He said details on the Church of Scientology’s plans for Memphis are coming.

“We’ll be making an announcement in a few days,” Slaughter said when reached by phone Thursday, adding that the church is not currently meeting at the Central Avenue property.

The Shelby County Assessor of Property’s 2008 appraisal of the building is $440,500. It sits on 1.14 acres and is zoned for religious use. The building was built in the early 1900s and served as a private residence for about 30 years. Then it was home to St. James Episcopal Church for roughly 50 years after that.

The Church of Scientology Mission of Memphis bought the building in June 1997 for $475,000, opening its doors later that fall. The building has 7,500 square feet on the top two floors, plus a 3,000-square-foot renovated basement.

Slaughter said the home needs to have regular bathrooms put back in, and that he’s started doing “minor, deferred maintenance stuff,” but after that he wouldn’t disclose other details about the renovations.

“We haven’t really decided what we’re going to do yet,” he said. “It’s kind of early for me to give a full description because we’re still investigating what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it and how long it’s going to take. We’re still in the planning stages and under design.”

In conjunction with the latest sale, Slaughter assumed a Jan. 20, 2006, deed of trust on the property for $550,000 through Slaughter Enterprises LLC. Slaughter himself signed as the managing member for that entity.

Here you can see some of what they did and get an idea of the squalor they live in:

(Photos from the Zillow entry for 1440 Central Ave Memphis)

Now, you may well be wondering: what happened to the Mission?

The Slaughter’s moved it to a strip mall in the sticks.

If you Google “Scientology Memphis” you get a number of official church links. The one at http://www.scientology.org still lists the Central Ave. address and a disconnected phone number.

There is another entry under http://www.scientology-memphis.org. Click on that one and it takes you to a page that still has a nice photo of the Central Ave. premises at the top, but the address is now given as Colliervillle TN, 20 miles outside Memphis.

And here is the final proof of the shriveling world of Miscavige. Right on the webpage, the opening hours of the “Memphis” (Collierville) mission are listed:

Wednesday and Thursday 7pm to 9pm

Saturday 9am to 1pm.

This is the “booming” Scientology Mission Network as it ACTUALLY is.

When the lights and cameras are packed up and there is no more “PR caper” to be had, the sad truth is that the Mission network is disappearing from the face of the earth.

I suggest that the following letter from Dani Lemberger will cause effects on the order of those created by the letter of Luis Garcia, the email of Debbie Cook and the email of Karen De La Carriere concerning her son Alexander. It is a reference work worth studying. Please see that it gets the distribution it warrants.

Mosey, Dani, Tami, and Marty at Casablanca, Tejas

Dani Lemberger, Dror Center, Haifa, Israel

11 July 2012

Dear friends, fellow Scientologists,

The History of the Attached Letter

The writing of the attached letter, “Assignment of Treason
Condition – David Miscavige,” was completed by Dani Lemberger and
the execs of Dror Center on 10 June 2012. The planned date of release
was 4 July 2012, upon the return of Tami and Dani from the U.S.
Tami and Dani went to New York on 15 June. On 20 June we flew
to Corpus Christi, Texas, where we spent 8 days with Marty and Monique
Rathbun. We enjoyed fabulous hospitality and continued there our
research of “independent Scientology”. We flew to Tampa on 28 June,
planning to spend a few days with close friends in Clearwater (CW) and to go in for scheduled interviews at Flag on 30 June. When we landed at Tampa airport, on 28 June at 8pm, we were handed a letter by Flag HCO, informing us that we had been declared SP’s (Suppressive Persons, excommunicated). We have never seen the SP Declare itself. Our friends in CW were notified of the ‘declare’ earlier that afternoon, so they could not let us stay at their home. At midnight we checked into a hotel in CW. We could not meet any of our “old” friends in CW, but made new friends with Mike Rinder, Christie Collbran and mighty Jack King Rinder. The Rinder’s made us feel at home and introduced us to many more “indies”, loyal Scientologists who had to flee the church so as to practice Scientology peacefully and honestly.

Obviously, many of the planned recipients of this letter will not
read it now, since those cowed by the church are not allowed to receive
any communications from us. We are proud and relieved to be part of the
rapidly expanding “indie” movement. It is painful to lose friends of many
years but our many new friends are courageous and of high integrity and
we share the goal of making Scientology available to all. The days of monopolies and tyrants are over. Now, even in the Middle East. Bashar al-Assad is butchering his people so as to hold on to power over the ruins of Syria. Miscavige is ‘declaring’ half of Scientologists so as to maintain his stranglehold on the other half – dazed, confused and ignorant. Zinedine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi are gone. Assad and Miscavige will soon follow.

My dear friend, please allow me your time and read the attached letter. Pass it
on to all your friends. We are the friends of L. Ron Hubbard, the greatest friend of Mankind.

Love, Dani Lemberger

The complete letter, starting with the above cover letter, is attached in pdf format for ease in downloading for further distribution:

We have found that staff requires this prerequisite: a good Scientologist.

A long time ago they used to tell us what we needed was a good businessman. We’ve had good businessmen, and we fired them. What they used to tell us was, what we needed was a good publicity man that was really trained in publicity. And we’ve had them and they laid an egg, and we fired them.

And every once in a while we have had to fill a post with somebody who was not quite up to handling that post, and we missed. And we finally found what the common denominator was of an individual who could handle the post in an organization or any post in the organization. And that person was – the common denominator is – a good auditor. If a person is not a good auditor, there will be something wrong with his organizational activities.

Boy, that is something to remember…

…There are people around that believe that a Scientologist – a Scientologist is somebody exclusively who audits people professionally. There are a lot of Scientologists who do this. But that is not everything one does. Let me tell you that on staff, as sharp as we are about this sort of thing, we find that a person who is not a good auditor (that’s not a good Scientologist) — a good auditor, who can sit down there and turn out an excellent session, who can get good results on a preclear, is the only person we really like to have on staff because they always do a good job. They always have the ability to understand the problems of those around them, and they have the ability of handling a situation.

For 20 years I was an active member of the Church of Scientology, first as a public person taking courses, then as a staff member and finally as an international missionary. My trajectory through the church traces a dual path of increasing awareness and improvement while at the same time trying not to notice the things that were wrong. The problem was that the more aware I became the harder it was to ignore what wasn’t right.

My story is not heroic. I made and accepted excuses for the “bad” parts of the Church. In many cases I perpetrated wrongnesses on others, led witch hunts and used force and threats to get compliance. In the end it was only when I, personally, had been repeatedly betrayed that I was prompted to take action.

Last week I received a call from the local Org ethics officer, informing me that I had been declared a suppressive person. No reason was given, I was not sent, or shown, or even read my SP declare. Such was my ignoble ending of church membership!

The trip started in 1980 in Bellevue, Washington. I had just moved to Washington and was looking for a job when I was stopped by an attractive gal in the street and asked to do a survey. This led to taking the personality test and signing up for the Communications Course.

Back then the course consisted of reading the definitions of basic scientology terms and then doing the Training Routines (TRs). I completed the course in a few weeks and was then signed up for an auditor training package at the mission.

In a few more months I completed the training and became a New Era Dianetics Auditor. I then went over to the local Scientology Org and did my internship and started the next training levels.

Things seemed pretty cool in Scientology, there were lots of young people, like me, and the idealism was up my alley. “To hell with the “authorities” let’s create a better world.” The concept of the reactive mind was very real and as I audited more people I could really see that there was a hope.

Andy at Clear Lake

In June 1981 I joined staff at Bellevue Mission. I was posted in Division 6 and was a body router, basic course supervisor and Div 6 registrar. I was good at doing test evaluations and started giving introductory lectures.

In 1982 the Bellevue Mission went completely off the rails and got into the de-dinging (a whack-o squirrel process), flowing power to those above us (meaning that staff were forced to do favors for those above us) and other Nazi-scientology stuff. We went whole-hog: the mission sold intensives of de-dinging, engaged in group crush-close regging and generally went crazy. I recall graduation events at the local org during this time period. A normal Friday night graduation would take an hour or so. But during the “de-dinging” era they took three hours! This was because you couldn’t stop clapping! No one wanted to be the first person to stop clapping because it would mean that you had some out-ethics…so when a speaker made a mention of how great LRH was we all started clapping, and clapping, and clapping…then we’d start to nervously look sideways at each other, each person secretly wanting to stop clapping, but no one wanting to be the first one to stop. Ah, the good old days…

Anyway, we (Bellevue Mission) languished for three (1982 to 1985) long years after this, and what pulled us out was the beginning of the consulting companies starting up and sending in public. Our old Mission Holder, Mike Chatelain, started to work for David Singer in 1985 (they opened a west coast office near by) and we started to get Chiropractors on lines. I became very active with the other WISE groups, Hollander, Latch and Sterling. I traveled all over the US and signed up their clients for mission services like Life Repair Auditing, some of my favorite time on staff in the US. The mission went from 1 and 2 First Service Starts a week to 10 and 12.

From my view the mid to late 1980’s were the time of greatest expansion of the Church. The Dianetics TV ads were going, there were new covers for the books and generally there was more acceptance of the Church. The future looked bright.

I became the Executive Director of the Mission (1987), did the complete Organization Executive Course, had two missions (Bellevue and Honolulu) and in 1990 found myself as the Executive Director of the Seattle Day Organization (during the Good Will Games).

Being an Org ED was a complete nightmare. The incessant stupid orders and three times daily phone calls, the endless computer generated non-compliance reports, the idiotic emphasis on getting people to the “events” and the complete lack of any effective Div 6 was awful. I found the Org environment much more robotic and stultified than the Mission network. In the missions we were more allowed to think and do what we thought was best to service people. In retrospect it wasn’t that we were actually “allowed” to do more, it was simply that no one could see what we were doing. We would often and with great happiness break the rules to provide unselfish service. I used to make a joke while working at the Org that they were “so standard that they were empty.” (Empty of public, that is)

Seattle Org had moved into a 28,000 sq. ft. building before the GW games ($18,000 a month rent) and since the entire Good Will Games were a complete dud, dissemination wise, the Org was broke.

I tried to route off Org staff (I was in debt up to my eyeballs), I asked for a Committee of Evidence, was denied, blew from LA, then I was told that I was going to get some justice action. While awaiting my beheading I got in comm with Greg Hughes (he was in International Management at the time), who I knew fromSterling, and he helped me escape and come back toSeattle. I routed off Org staff, worked for a few months to pay my debt to the Org and some other debts and went back on staff at Bellevue Mission in 1992.

I was in no hurry to get back on any management line and so became the Course Supervisor for a while. Being the Supervisor was by far the best staff position I ever held. By that time I was OT 5, OEC, KTL,LOC, and had done almost every course at the Org. I completed the Elementary Data Evaluators course, (actually I liked it so much I did it twice) and felt I had a good grasp of the basics by then.

Creating an expanding course room was easy; I discovered that the most vital tool was using ARC. If the students felt that you cared about them, their lives, their problems and were really there to HELP them then they came back. It was always a mystery to me that when I would send new staff for Course Supervisor training, either to Flag or LA that they would come back with some fascist attitude towards their students. They would return with some sort of “standard” fanaticism and order the students to use their demo kit or clear words, not really helping them, or personally caring, just acting like some sort of prison guards. In my view the idea being pushed was that being “standard” meant being tough, rough, rude, almost mean and it shocked me that people thought they could service the public (or other staff!) without loads of ARC. Especially new public.

In 1993 I was asked by SMI to go to Russia for a mission project, I was always interested to see for myself what Russia was really like, so I raised some money and went. I was there two weeks with 4 or 5 other mission holders. When I got on the plane to go back I just wanted to stay. The people there in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (both missions had about 8 staff at that time) were so intent on doing Dianetics and going clear and helping others it was very theta. I got back to my post at Bellevue Mission and decided to move to Russia. It took a while to get replaced and overcome the counter intention to my leaving staff, but in 1995 I moved there.

I was well known at Scientology Missions International (SMI), due to being a mission holder, and headed to LA to visitSMIINTand set up my duties with them before heading to Russia.

By the time I arrived back in Russia (October ’95) to live and work Moscow and St Pete had grown to large booming missions and I was reluctant to go inspect or advise them as I was worried that I would mess them up (and get in trouble). My reasoning was that they had built much larger missions than I ever had, so I didn’t feel that I should be ‘advising” them. I felt like I should be learning from them!

For the first year or so, I went out to outlying cities, Perm, Nizhny Tagil, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladivostock, Novosibirsk and many more places in Russia. I also visited new Dianetics Centers in Belorussia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine. I had a great time riding the train, staying with families, lecturing and helping to expand missions. Many of these missions had never had a Clear or OT or trained Scientologist come for a visit. My duties were to inspect the mission and help them in any way needed, train staff, observe and help them get in standard tech for servicing public. I went to more than 30 missions while I was there, (1995 to 1999) inspecting, correcting and lecturing.

With out a doubt it was the most fun I ever had in Scientology, nothing before or since compares. I was not around in the 1950’s when DMSMH was released, but have heard the stories, and Russia in the late 90’s seemed just like those stories. The overall excitement was awesome. Moscow and St Pete expanded to over 100 staff each, with huge successful Div 6/s. There were co-audits going on all the time and hundreds of auditors in the missions. The course rooms were filled and the place was buzzing with excited, optimistic people. The missions had very Spartan quarters, sometimes there were 10 auditing “rooms” squeezed into what would be 2 rooms here in the US. But MEST didn’t matter, they had big booming missions, there were tons of students, FSM’s, booksellers, it was all fun and exciting. My purpose in Scientology was revitalized. Somewhat ironically my time there also formed the basis for my waking up and (slowly!) seeing how psychotic things were and eventually leaving the church.

Later, in 1997 I was asked to do projects at Moscow. I recall doing an inspection there and on a Thursday morning was inspecting and noticed that no one was on post. I was like, “Well, where are all the staff?” I was told that they were on study, as they were every morning.

I was about to go pull all the staff off course and lecture them about on Thursday we DON’T study in the morning because that’s when we get the stats up, but caught myself and realized (not for the first time) the insanity of the stat push mentality. I had dozens of other epiphanies while at Moscow and later while at St Pete missions. It started to dawn on me that one major reason for all the expansion in Russia was that they didn’t have the whacko western Sea Org nut jobs there every minute looking over their shoulders, giving them stupid orders.

I was in St Petersburg for the Dianetics (May 9th) Event in 1998. The event was held at a huge auditorium, it held more than 1,000 people. The event started at 2pm, and lasted until 8 at night. There was food, music, performances, cakes, games, balloons, prizes, speeches, and lots of fun. And this was all before the “official” event, where the DVD of the actual May 9th event was played for the public. The place was packed. No one wanted to leave early, or escape. It was night and day different from events back in the US. Can you even imagine an event in the USA where 1,000 people attended? Anyway, I was there in St Pete doing a project for SMI and it so happened that there were several Sea Org Execs there, from LA. They came to the event and were shocked. I was sitting right behind them and could hear them speaking to each other, they were aghast that the event was so long, that there were children singing, that a rock band played, they thought that this was disrespectful to LRH. They didn’t like the games or the prizes or poetry reading…(the Russian people LOVED all of this) The Sea Org Execs all thought this “fun” stuff was off purpose and not okay. The event ended with the showing of a brand new LRH film, “The Evolution of a Science”. I still recall the playing of the movie, to this day…the movie sucked! It was supposed to be for new people, but was all about psychiatry and shock therapy, it was a stupid film for new people. The Russian people were shocked and dismayed by it. Here they were having a fun party and now here is this horrid film, a real turd in the punch bowl! The Sea Org people all tried to look proud of the film, while the Russians made their displeasure known… the general consensus of the brainwashed execs was that the translation of the movie must have been poor…

By this time, after 17 years of being on staff, I had seen and experienced many countless examples of stupidity, injustice and misapplication of any rational management technology, but always wrote it off as some middle management virus. I had this idea that the guys at the top (DM and Int. Mgt.) were super cool, smart, and that they just didn’t know how whacko the middle management nut jobs were. I couldSEEthe out-points but I could not confront what they meant, wasn’t willing to follow the thought to its only logical end.

Another interesting thing was that as I stayed more and more in Moscow and St Pete in 1998 and 1999 advising the missions and lecturing I was always under pressure to study more LRH for lecture material. I read and re read all of the LRH books many times including “History of Man”. And I recall a section in that book where LRH describes a space opera society where the citizens were so indoctrinated that if one of them even had a bad thought that they would immediately turn them selves into the nearest police station.

This really hit me. I had had so many sec checks by then, for OT levels, for this and for that, so many “ethics cycles” (which of course were NOT Ethics cycles, but justice cycles in disguise) that I was stunned. I could plainly see that I was indoctrinated just like LRH described in HOM. This was a horrible idea to me because I “knew” we were freeing people, not enslaving them. Yet I could see that I was behaving like one of these implanted “citizens”. I wondered if it wasn’t just something wrong with me. I couldn’t really come to grips with it, so I just shelved it, and went on.

While I was in Russia I was sent to other countries for projects, I went to India twice to help establish missions, once to Bombay (SMIsent me there, to work with Helmut Flasch), twice to Patiala, I was also sent bySMIto Japan (to work on the Shinto project).

I was in Moscow Mission from the summer of 1997 until the end of the birthday game in 1998. Moscow Mission won the game that year (for the first time). I still have all their b-day stat graphs from then. They were doing 150 to 200 first service starts a week, 1200 to 1700 NBSTI Raw (Number of Books Sold to New People) a week and the rest of the stats there were commensurate with those Division 6 statistics. As a side note I spoke to the Moscow Org ED in September, 2010. He was in LA for some cycle and called me. His name is Anton and he was the Tech Sec when I was there in 1998. He said that they were getting around 7 first service starts a week at that time.

In March 1998SMIsent my wife and I to Fiji on a mission with Manu Tupou and Jean Harness. We opened a new mission there, recruited staff and sent them to ANZO for training. In the fall of 1998 I was also sent by the IAS to open up a Mission in the country of Burkina Faso, in West Africa.

While I was working as a pioneer, or missionary, I was awarded as a PowerFSMtwice, and as an EliteFSMtwo times, I was in fact never anFSMand never put inFSMslips on anyone while doing this work over seas.

My first award for my activities as a pioneer came in December of 1995. I was at theOTL(Sea Org Base) inMoscowand got a call fromSMIINT. Apparently there were quite a few, 10 to 20 Russian people who were FSMs and had gotten in 100 or more new people to start their first services, and they were all hoping to go to LA for the NY event. But none of them could get visas. Of course, the reason they didn’t get visas was that no one had the foresight to start the visa application process until mid-way through December, and by then it was a “hill 10” to get bodies on stage for the New Years Event.

So,SMItold my wife and me that we should come to LA and get awarded! Of course the people I spoke to atSMI, Beate Gordon and Claire Gaiman knew exactly what we had been doing, they knew we were not FSMs and had not selected anyone in, but no matter, we could come and go on stage, and we didn’t need visas! So, they bought us tickets and had us come, we were provided a place to stay. To us it was like a free (warm weather!) vacation! My wife was awarded as a powerFSMand I was awarded as an eliteFSM.

My system of pay (as worked out by Chief Officer SMIInt) was that I would go to the missions primarily to train and correct staff, and that the project financing would come from lectures. I would give lectures to the public, the mission would charge a small fee for each lecture and I would get half of the money, the mission keeping the other half. So even though I was never an FSMI was on stage. Usually I would arrive to LA a few days before the event and be given a hat of helping push other people living in LA to become power FSMs so there would be more bodies on stage. I have lots of insane stories about all of that. The last event where I was given some award was the 2000 May 9th Dianetics event where I was awarded as a top international pioneer.

As a side note about awards and the sheer insanity of them, one of the Russians I was close to was Vladimir Kiropatnik. He was the original ED of Moscow Mission. I met him when I was first there in 1993. He was a very theta and dedicated guy and worked hard to expand the Mission. In 1997 Vladimir was awarded the IAS Freedom Medal, at the event they portrayed him as the single person who opened up all of Russia to Scientology and saved the country. The PR was so over the top! I know that Vladimir was upset over how they grossly overstated what he had done. Actually this set him up for criticism from others, as many thought that he was the one who made up the lies. I was close to him and I know it was quite a PTP for him. Later when the Executive Director of Saint Petersburg Mission won the same award (Galina Petrovna) they did the same thing. It was the same with anyone and everyone I personally knew, they would over sell, exaggerate and even outright lie about the accomplishments to make them sound incredible. From my direct experience, both Vladimir and Galina definitely deserved the Freedom Medal awards. They are both incredibly hardworking and dedicated people. But the point is, why lie and exaggerate their accomplishments? Just telling the truth would have been perfectly fine. The fact of lying about the accomplishments of these people is illustrative of the entire current church management. Of course nothing beats the absurd lies they made for Tom Cruise when he won his IAS award…I recall it was an award for introducing more than a billion people to Scientology.

As I discovered at a much later time receiving these awards may have been one of the main reasons that I wound up leaving the church.

I returned toRussiain Jan 1999 and I went back to work forSMIdoing the usual. I began to get antsy about going up the bridge and wanted to get on OT 7 so I decided to start working as a WISE consultant. I worked about 7 months as a consultant inSt Petersburg, paid for OT 6, OT 7 and 10 intensives and arrived at Flag in Dec. 1999.

My plan was that I would use one or two intensives on eligibility and set ups and then have lots of intensives left over for future 6-month checks, I would be back out pioneering and be on OT 7!

But what came next was a completely horrible nightmare.

I wound up using 13 intensives of auditing, almost all of it on security checking. I cannot describe in email format how utterly awful it all was. It was unjust, demeaning, stupid, introverting and actually made me feel like I was psychotic. As I look back, I felt a sort of desperate feeling, slightly propitiative, wanting to throw my self at the feet of someone and beg forgiveness. A down tone “need to show that I’m valuable to the group” attitude and underlying this was the basic concept of “I am bad”.

I hated the auditing, but couldn’t complain because you can’t complain while you’re on a sec check unless you want it to take longer. I tried to act happy and get it done. Somehow by some miracle I was able to get my needle to float and get done. Then I pleaded that I was broke and owed money and I was allowed to leave.

This was the first time I was at an Advanced Org as a public person. I spent a lot of time in the MAA office (as a result of all the Knowledge Reports from 9 intensives of security checking). I was appalled at what went on. A day down there included lots of nervous waiting to even get in to see the MAA. Then they would review the KR’s from your sessions and assign you conditions. It was NOT a self-determined action. I tried several times to say that I didn’t think I needed to do ANY conditions for my overts, but was ordered to do so. I pointed out many times that this entire process was NOT an ethics action, but a justice action. But the deal was: Do it our way, or you’ll never get on the OT levels and go free. I saw person after person there in the MAA’s office doing lowers and amends for such stupid things as reading a site on the internet, or looking at “pornography” or masturbating. The idea that was being enforced by the MAA’s was that these actions were severely out-ethics and could bring disrepute to Scientology. I argued that labeling these actions as wrong or in any way out-ethics was itself very wrong and out ethics, as doing so would only drive in a persons anchor points. But all that I accomplished with my arguing these points was the certainty on the part of the MAA that I needed MORE security checking.

I was on the OT 6 meter drills when I left and knew I would never return. I felt that there was something definitely wrong with the auditing, but also had some idea that it was me that was nuts. I knew I liked helping people and so just wanted to go back and get busy.

From there things were a bit unsettled. I had planned to go back to Russia but was denied a visa. I discovered later that I had been blacklisted by the Russian FSB (state security agency) along with several other foreigners who had been invited to Russia by Scientology, like Malcolm McClintock, Lynn Irons and others. So, I was not allowed to return. I wound up moving to Nice, France for 6 months in late 2000, then on to Pavlodar, Kazakhstan where I worked as a WISE consultant for 9 months, then on to Copenhagen for 8 months. All the time trying to get back toRussia.

The more I was on WISE lines I noticed that things went worse for me. It seemed that as long as I was basically volunteering my time (as a Mission or Org staff member or full time pioneer) to help expand missions I was alright. I was still looked down on as I wasn’t Sea Org, but sort of barely accepted. Having been staff many years I was familiar with the pecking order, and understood how it all worked.

But now that I was mostly working in the WISE sector I was considered more of a public and less of a staff member. I could sense a change. I started to feel like a farm animal, people were eye-balling me for what they could get from me, could I be an income cycle, could I be student points, could I donate money to IAS? I was ordered to events, to ethics interviews, ordered to be on course. As a WISE consultant here were quotas for the number of our clients that were sent into a local Org orMissionfor services. There was a tacit threat over my head; if I didn’t comply with the above requirements then I would be in danger of losing my license and ability to deliver WISE courses and consulting.

I wanted to get out of consulting and I wound up going to the NYC area in 2001 (where I am from originally) to work. I had two jobs; one wasCOOof a company in NJ with several interesting patents we were trying to get going. As that company was getting just started I needed more pay and started to work as a consultant again in the WISE sector.

In 2002 I got an 11 page KR written on me by Walter Kotric (CO CLO EU). He accused me of every crime under the sun and said that I was never allowed back on his continent. I sent back a more or less fuck you response and asked for a Committee of Evidence. Nothing happened. Every product I had achieved was attacked.

One might think it strange that a person who was routinely honored by Int. Management each year would be attacked. But in truth the awardees on stage at the Int Events had routinely had their production stats puffed up (NOT by the person, but by the management terminals!) to look stellar. There was no real recognition from Int Management of having DONE anything really good, we were all just statistics, bodies gotten on stage, part of the PR for the church.

Interestingly I had heard from 2 people, Barb Wiseman (a pioneer in Russia in the early 1990’s) and Malcolm McClintock (he ran the Sea Org Base in Moscow in early 2000) that Walter Kotric HATED any Scientologists who went Pioneering “on his Continent”. Barbara told me that Walter went out of his way to attack her when she was awarded as a Power FSM for her work there in 1993, an award that she NEVER asked for.

In April of 2003 I received a phone call and ordered by WISE International to report to LA. No reason, just come,NOW. I arrived and met two other Russian Pioneers there, Bud Reichle and Lynn Irons. We went to the Scientology Headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard and met with some high up woman in OSA (Judith?) and a guy by the name of Dan Brown. They explained that we were all called there because of our involvement in Russia. They told us that currently there was trouble in Russia and that the plan was to do ethics cycles on us three, sort of to destimulate the area from afar. I was shown some reference from the Suppressed Person Rundown. The idea was that if we three did an ethics cycle, related to tour work inRussia, the result would be a bettering of the overall conditions of Scientology inRussia. It was sort of like: Currently Scientology in Russia is under attack, and if you three write up your overts and come clean then the conditions over there will improve.

As I began to get in comm., the report written on me by Walter Kotric came up, and then a cycle fromKazakhstan.

I had visited Kazakhstan several times in the late 1990’s and at that time met a local scientologist named Bolat Agzamovich. Bolat was working in the oil industry, but had later gotten into politics and had become the deputy governor of his region.

In late 2000 while I was still in Nice, France, I was personally invited to move to Pavlodar, Kazakhstan by the CO WISE CIS, Vladmir Kiropatnik. Bolat had been the deputy governor of his region for sometime; he had communication lines with the leaders of industry all over the country. The idea was that I would move there, work with Bolat, establish a WISE presence, consulting these businesses and maybe start aHubbardCollege.

Bolat had been donating HUGE sums of money to the church to aid expansion. He had donated hundreds of thousand of dollars to start a whole pile of Missions, Narconons, Applied Scholastics groups all acrossKazakhstan. He was quite famous for this.

I saw the annual IAS Event in October of 2000. There was direct mention of expansion of Scientology inKazakhstan, specifically mentioning the opening of the many new groups and also a report that the President of Kazakhstan had officially welcomed Scientology to the country!

This sounded like what I was waiting for and I packed up and moved there in December, 2000. When I actually arrived inPavlodar, Bolat was inCopenhagenfor auditing, he arrived home a week later and announced that he had decided to quit his government post! This was a surprise!

He took over a transportation (tram) company owned by the state and I went to work for him. I worked with him in the Tram company and we had a blast, it was a huge success.

As a side note after my arrival in Kazakhstan I excitedly asked the staff and public about the report that President Nazarbayev had proclaimed an official welcome to Scientology. Well, none of the people there had heard such a thing. I had several people directly contact the government to query this, and we discovered that this reported acknowledgement of Scientology had never taken place.

While I was there I heard some allegations that Bolat had accepted bribes while he had been deputy governor. I was close to him and asked him a few times about this and he said no, he didn’t, so I left it alone. I left Pavlodar in the summer of 2000 and moved to Copenhagen.

What had precipitated being ordered to Los Angeles was that Bolat had been to Copenhagen some time in 2001/2002 and confessed in some sec check that he had in factALLof the money he had donated to the church, forALLthe mission starter packages and Narconons, applied scholastics, etc, all of it, was money he had received as payments for his services while deputy governor. From what I could understand, Bolat finally relented and confessed that all the money he donated to the church came from the bribes he received while Deputy Governor.

This came out right around the Reed Slatkin Ponzi scheme scandal, and so there was a real hornet’s nest over this. I thought it was all a hoot, and I asked if the church was going to refund all the money so Bolat could give it back. My two interrogators failed to see the humor in any of this. .

I was surprised by all this and I pointed out that if anyone cared to look at any facts like dates of when he took the “bribes”, the dates in my passport, etc, it was easy to see that I was never physically IN Kazakhstan when Bolat “took the bribes” but no matter. Logic had no merit. I asked how I could have stopped him from taking bribes if I wasn’t in the country. I was told that I “should have known” and done something. I felt trapped. If I wanted to keep consulting and making money, I had to do it. My choices were to walk out of Scientology right then, or just bend over and do it.

So I did. I fudged my way through it and told everyone what they wanted to hear. I prayed my needle would float at the right time and that no one would suspect that I fucking hated them and that I was on my way out.

I went back to New Jersey in a state of shock. All my stable datum’s busted. From my experiences as a Mission Holder and Org ED with the admin tech I could see that its “use” was making things worse world wide, not better. From my last trip to Flag I could see that the tech was not working. And that it was in fact being used to control people. From my travels I knew that all the hype and PR reported by management was utter bullshit. And now it was crystal clear that the application of ethics and justice tech was beyond gone.

When I got back home I talked my wife into moving with me to Washington State. Just leaving and moving was in itself a form of escape. I felt like I was escaping from a prison, I didn’t let anyone know where I was going. After 24 years of having to report where I was to someone in the church, I was free (sort of).

For many years, from 2000 to 2004 I spoke to no one about my doubts and disagreements. During those years I knew things were bad and I wanted out, but dared not communicate about it. From 2004 until 2008 I had one friend who was ahead of me on the path out who listened as I itsa-ed and to whom I could speak freely. I communicated my feelings, doubts, self invalidations and slowly the fog lifted. I was so indoctrinated with the idea that I must have my own overts and that to have pulled in this bad shit I must have somehow caused it. But as I destimulated I could reason better and evaluate what I had seen. The overall stats of Scientology are down, and have been for a long time. As stats are the measure, then the management must be bad. I personally saw many lies from management about how great things were when they weren’t. I realized that things were bad. I realized that my stable datum that the guys at the top were smart and cool must be way off.

When I lived inRussiaI once heard an Old Russian proverb: “The fish rots from the head.” Of course that datum lined up with all my observations. The bad shit wasn’t a mistake, it was planned. The middle management guys weren’t just nut cases; they were just pushing down the line the shit that came from the top. That datum really aligned so well with what I had personally seen that I knew it must be the truth.

In 2009 I saw the blog “Counterfeit Dreams” by Jeff Hawkins. I read the whole thing. It blew so much charge for me, reading the details of what happened behind the scenes, getting a real view of what things were like. Jeff is such a great writer and what he describes has real impact. It never made any sense to me, why were the DMSMH question ads ended, why was there no new effective ad campaign, how could leadership be so stupid and not see that without a great marketing plan the church would start cannibalizing the public?

Once the held-down 7’s were handled and I could really LOOK it was easy to see WHY Scientology had horrible PR and WHY it was contracting.

I am more than slightly embarrassed that it took me so long to wake the fuck up!!!

Scientology is supposed to be about LOOKING and evaluating for oneself, becoming more causative, it’s about COMMUNICATION, helping others and building a better world.

But the current “church” is all about NOT looking, NOT communicating; now it’s about not THINKING! A current church member is told what to think, what to say, who they can and cannot communicate with. Its NOT about self-determinism, it’s about being a robot.

The current “church” is really like an insane doctor cutting out the “cancerous” body parts to get rid of illness. Those Scientologists who dare to think for themselves are purged, expelled, declared suppressive.

But the church has taken this to a new level of insanity: now it’s the cancer running the church seeking to amputate, cut out, expel, the healthy tissue! Soon there will be nothing and no one left in the corporate church of scientology besides cancer tissue!

Last weeks phone conversation and news of being declared a suppressive person came as no surprise. It was more like the final process of a grade in auditing, you come to the end and someone asks you “Would you like others to have the gains that you now have?”

And my answer is, Yes! I am happy for what I got out of Scientology and I am very happy to be free from the madness of what Corporate Scientology has beccome.

One of the steps I took to rehabilitate the wins I had with the tech was going in session. I found a great auditor, out here in the Independent Field and (with trepidations) signed up to get a review. Part of the auditing program was to handle any by-passed charge I had related to past auditing I received in the corporate church. I recall the question: Were you audited while you were under stress? I laughed and cried and swore my head off answering that question! Was I audited while under stress????? HA!!!! When wasnt I under stress? Lets see: theres the stress of paying the money (or rather borrowing it and worrying about being able to re-pay it) theres the stress of worrying what will happen when youre sent to see the Ethics Officer; the stress of losing your post, or not being allowed to take the next step on the Bridge, the worry of being expelled if you disagree. I was worried before I even went to Flag for auditing: scrutinizing my every action wondering if “it would come up” on my sec check and get me sent to the Ethics Officer!!! I realized that ALL of my auditing in recent years in the church was all done over heavy stress. I was PTS to the Church!!! Needless to say, handling this was a HUGE relief.

Now my life is full of fun and creation. I have taken back up my dual passions of backpacking and photography. I have a fantastic wife and we have a seven year old son. Life is good.

The latest is in from Gabriel. He provides actual statistics of the Mission network. The uncooked facts demonstrate that you have been reading quite a bit of truth on this blog if you have been following for a while. Corporate Scientology, it seems, has become little more than an expensive lie production and dissemination factory.

Attached you’ll find the Mission LRH Birthday Game standings as of 11 February 2010:

A little math tells a big story, one that DM doesn’t want Scientologists to know.

First, that most rudimentary of mathematical exercises, of which DM appears incapable: counting. There are 376 missions on this list, a far cry from the 488 touted by Lesevre “from International Management” at the Birthday event a year later.

Now it gets a little more complicated, but hang with me. While we can’t scope out the OIC’s of all of these organizations, these numbers DO tell the story if we take the time to decode them.

The way the Mission Birthday Game works is you get points based on three-week trends. Affluence gets you three points and Normal gets you one point. In 2010, there were approximately 22 statistics that counted for Birthday Game points.

These 22 statistics measure the success or failure of the organization in any given week, and its growth or lack thereof over time.

The way the Birthday Game works, if you were to just run a flat-line organization (Emergency Condition), with statistics fluctuating back and forth randomly but ultimately remaining level, you would score points on about half of your stats. That is because about half your stats would be going up some while the others go down some, back and forth, etc.

Half of 22 = 11 stats scoring points. Let’s assume that six are affluences and five are normals, counteracted by six dangers and five emergencies. And if you scored like this every week, you’d have no growth.

That comes out to 23 points in the Birthday Game for the week.

With 22 Birthday Game stats that can score, a 23-point week = stagnation.

So here is the way to read these numbers, without being able to actually see the graphs:

66 Points = Affluence across the boards

More than 23 points = growing

Less than 23 points = contracting

By dividing the cumulative numbers by 50 (the number of weeks into the Birthday Game we were when these standings were posted) we arrive at the average number of points scored by each mission each week throughout the game.

During the 2009 – 2010 Birthday Game, ONLY 16 MISSIONS AVERAGED OVER 23 POINTS PER WEEK.

Whoever opens this e-mail should make sure to print it out, make it known to the staff of where the mission stands, and then post it on any and all notice boards that you have to get the staff and your public pumped up to make their target.

Remember each Mission is to make at least 1 full package sale or 2 lecture upgrades.

If your mission isn’t on the list that means I either don’t have an updated report from you or you are at zero which can and needs to be changed immediately for us to make the $6,000,000 target.

Right now we are at $3,438,795.00 so that is only $2,561,205 left to go!!!!

Bridge Publications only covers the Western Hemisphere. So that’s $100 million just for the West in one year, not inclusive of whatever New Era was selling.

I remember reading this and getting a sort of electric thrill. “Wow, it’s really happening. Pubs is going to be able to market the hell out of Dianetics, now, and fill up the orgs and missions! It’s just around the corner! TV ads, magazines, marketing galore. We’re going to capture the fabled 5% of the world book market! Sheer momentum and planetary clearing and all that!”

No marketing campaign.

Maybe there just wasn’t enough money in the “war chest” yet.

But let’s do a little math.

Each Basics Book and Lecture package cost $3,000.

Let’s assume a cost of $1.00 total production cost for each of the 280 lectures in the Basics. This is actually very high but let’s just be safe in terms of including the price of the binders, supplements, shipping, pay for SO members, etc.

Here is a link that cites industry standard CD replication costs of $.50, and this is if you outsource:

Now let’s add in the cost of each of the 18 Basic books. We’ll assume a cost of $10 per book, but it’s certainly less than this. But we’ll wrap into this costs of shipping, etc.

So a full Basics Book and Lecture package costs a maximum of $280 for lectures + $180 for books = $460.

$460 is only 15% of $3000. At least 85% of Basics sales are profit.

The way the discounts were structured, the distributors of the Basics (orgs and missions) sent almost all of their sales money up the lines to Bridge Publications.

So of this $100,000,000: about $85,000,000 was pure unadulturated profit.

And this was just the beginning of the Basics, in ’07. This was before the endless libraries and the 16 sets for your garage. Before Bridge Pubs started issuing official handles on the sales objection “I don’t have enough shelf space.”

No wonder DM could just never get enough. No wonder nearly every Scientology terminal in existence has been pressured into becoming a glorified Bookstore Officer.

When you add this $85 million profit to whatever New Era has been selling, plus the millions each week that Flag is generating, plus IAS, plus Superpower, plus Idle Orgs, plus tithes, plus film licenses, plus plus plus plus, I estimate that it’s at the minimum HALF A BILLION dollars ANNUALLY funneling through the top.

And yet IAS reges incessantly pitch the newest emergency that requires the exact amount of emergency funding they feel they can extract from you or else the world ends.

The terrified vultures pick and pick and meanwhile high above them the Short Vulture is getting very fat indeed.

Miscavige’s maniacal greed meltdown has reached out to and apparently destroyed the Mission network (the smaller “churches” that once provided introductory Scientology services to many people in just about every city of 1/2 million people or more). A very recent defector who was in a position to witness it all has risked his future relations with family and prospects for business to provide us with the facts. Meet my man Gabriel and be sure to let him know how you appreciate his courage.

I have served as a staff member in the mission network for a number of years. I have very current data in the SMI Network that corroborates what Mr. Rathbun, Mr. Rinder and so many others are reporting.

Currently the mission network is on the verge of collapse. In terms of management it has been completely unmocked. I know of three missions that have closed in the past year or so: Lake Charles, Lafayette, and Gulfport. Lafayette has been open for a decade and used to be pretty strong – until one of its Mission Holders (an OT) died of cancer. The other MH got a “handling” at Flag and came back saying that her SP was the MH Lake Charles. Need I say more?

Meanwhile the Gulfport mission, a new baby mission, got reged out of existence by PDU. PDU reges camped out at the MHes’ house and extracted approximately $2 million over the course of two years. The MH complained about paying the rent for the building to keep the mission open, and finally just shut it down. Of course, this was a DM mission from the get-go: no auditor, sup, or delivery terminal to start with, $50K in books in the garage, so what could you expect?

They got the first million from them to help pay for the Basics manufacturing facility. Which makes one wonder: did Dave have that bad boy paid in full by parishioner donos before the presses even started rolling?

Meanwhile many “missions” report no points in the Birthday Game, which equals “dead mission” (DM?).

The CO SMI EUS was transferred to WUS and stuck into the Pasadena Idle Org on mission never to return (until I guess it’s time to go put on a show at the next org). The CO SMI LATAM (who doesn’t speak English very well) was ripped to SMI EUS. No CO SMI LATAM replaced him, so that cont has no CO SMI.

A couple years ago, the SMI Officer Int, who was very strong in the mission network from everything I heard from MHes, Claire Edwards, vaporized. Rumors were that she went way up the line to Int. Now that I’ve been reading your blog I wonder if she might have gone way up the line to the Hole.

Mike Mason took the reins as Mission Consultancy Chief Int as the SMI leader, but also vaporized. I think RPF, then out, but I was not directly on those lines so not sure.

It is no exaggeration to say that 95% of all comm we get from SMI is: a) Basics sales b) IAS Donations c) Event Attendance d) Dianetics Seminars (which at first glance actually seems slightly closer to on-policy but actually is a joke)

There are no other stats or VFPs. This is all that we were judged by as of late 2011.

The latest push has been to hold a Dianetics Seminar every Saturday and Sunday in every mission. This is a totally bugged target. And heavy ethics were being applied. We actually had terminals from I think ILO calling the MHes and reminding them that their RTC Minimum Standards required them to hold a Dianetics Seminar. It was a thinly veiled threat: “Hold Dianetics Seminars every weekend or we’ll rip your licenses.” In desperation, mission staff took to shoving into the Seminar kids, staff, anybody – stretching out one person over three or four weekends a little at a time – anything (the CO SMI Int later reprimanded MHes at the conference for this very practice, verifying it was flagrant!)

When we didn’t have a Dianetics Seminar, it sounded like the cont CO was getting tortured. It was a huge deal.

And despite all this PUSH, DON’T DEBUG, DRIVE, seminar attendance remained very low even at the cont level.

More than a year before this point, SMI called the first SMI Conference that it had held since the Basics came out. That’s right, SMI had become such a book outlet that it didn’t even have a SMI Conference for years.

The SMI Conference was run directly by WDC Ideal Orgs, Blankenship. Same Blankenship that I learned from this blog went out-2D and has been paid for silence.

It was a surreal moment for me. Here the SMI Officer Int was gone up-lines, and SMI management was shredded from long-running missions to Idle Orgs, and yet here was WDC Ideal Orgs, as high up as you can get but an entirely different sector, running the SMI Conference!!! Talk about a total reversal!

Of course, I didn’t think about it too much. I had my own problems – how do I fill up this damn seminar every weekend? Especially because my CO SMI is reporting the data on the Dianetics Seminar progress directly to WDC Ideal Orgs.

This huge outpoint corroborates the data you have on Miscavige’s circle being so small and closing fast. There is a ton of pressure right now coming down on missions and I assume orgs to use DM’s magical Div 6 Routes (scripted PE in 2.5 hours with 100% guaranteed re-sign rate? Really?) and especially the HDS. I guess the new routes are DM’s “handle” on the fact that he has finally reached a point of desperation for fresh blood.

I will send more data when I can.

ML,Gabriel

Keep telling us about the man, Gabriel, just like Stevie:

Lyrics:

He’s a man
With a plan
Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

Playin’ hard
Talkin’ fast
Makin’ sure that he won’t be the last
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

Makes a deal
With a smile
Knowin’ all the time that his lie’s a mile
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

Must be seen
There’s no doubt
He’s the coolest one with the biggest mouth
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

If you tell him he’s livin’ fast
He will say what do you know
If you had my kind of cash
You’d have more than one place to go oh

Oou…oou…oou oou…oou…

Any place
He will play
His only concern is how much you’ll pay
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

If he shakes
On a bet
He’s the kind of dude that won’t pay his debt
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

When you say that he’s living wrong
He’ll tell you he knows he’s livin’ right
And you’d be a stronger man
if you took Misstra Know-It- All’s advice oh oh

Oou…oou…oou oou…oou…

He’s a man
With a plan
Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand
He’s Misstra Know-It-All

Take my work
Please beware
Of a man that just don’t give a care no
He’s Misstra Know-It-All (Look out he’s coming)